Social
Classes

Society is still very much divided into the three traditional estates:
those who pray (the church), those who fight (the nobility), and those
who work (everyone else). The first estate, the church, is the most powerful
institution in France after the monarchy. It owns a third of the property
and probably collects about 40% of the revenue. Resentment toward the church
for its wealth and corruption should come as no surprise, especially as
is legally exempt from taxes -- although this does not mean that the clergy
were not sometimes persuaded to make a "gift" to the crown during wartime
or other fiscal crisis. (Eventually these "gifts" came to be quite customary.)

Francis I established the right of the French crown to award bishoprics
and other church benefices to its own candidates, which went a long away
towards preventing the formation of a Gallican church along the lines of
the Church of England. This also means the average church position was
a political job, and the majority of bishops hardly ever visited their
own cathedrals. The average village priest was usually a sub-contractor,
earning very low wages to care for the flock of the official holder of
the benefice (who collected its revenue). Every prominent family made a
point of putting a son into a lucrative church position, where they often
wielded a great deal of political influence on behalf of the head of house:
examples include the Duc de Guise and his brother the Cardinal de Lorraine,
Admiral Coligny and his brother the Cardinal de Chatillon, etc. A number
of such positions were essentially "hereditary" to certain families.

In spite of the religious wars, the Catholic church remains powerful
and will continue to be so. In the South, the Huguenot churches established
what resembled a kind of independent religious republic ruled by councils
of elders. These functioned rather well when there was essentially no government,
but they could not approach the power and wealth of the established church.
There was a strong "congregationalist" streak among many of the Protestant
churches (i.e. independent churches ruled by an assembly of the congregation).
As pastors trained in Geneva began to serve these congregations, this independence
eventually gave way to the "presbyterian" model promoted by Calvin (with
churches ruled by pastors and elders in a hierarchy intended to enforce
doctrinal purity).

The second estate is the nobility, who are also exempt from taxes on
the theory that they serve the state by offering the king their lives in
military service. The old feudal role of the knightly class has been breaking
down for some time, but it is taking them a long time to realize it. Royal
service has long been their prerogative, but they have been replaced by
bourgeois magistrates who are cheaper, harder working, and more loyal to
the crown. An increasingly money-driven economy makes living off your own
land a much more difficult prospect than it used to be. The nobility depend
on war to make money -- ransoms, loot, and royal appointments. A major
French defeat (like Pavia under Francis I) can bankrupt families. And if
there is no major war to undertake against foreigners, it is only a matter
of time before the French nobility start making war on each other. While
many military leaders in the religious wars were certainly motivated by
conscience (usually in the person of their wives and mothers), for many
it was just an opportunity to make a living and they changed sides as necessity
dictated.

It was not acceptable for a nobleman to do much of anything except serve
in the military, in the royal service, or in the church. Engaging in commerce
or mercantile activity, let alone manual labor, could result in derogation
-- the loss of all noble privileges for him and his descendants. Worst
of all, he lost his exemption to the "taille" -- the tax on the laboring
class. Jehan would worry about this a whole lot more if he weren't so broken
and jaded, but he’s still somewhat more ashamed of how he makes his living
than he is of murdering a man for his boots. Among other things, a nobleman
of France had the right to wear a sword any and everywhere, including in
the presence of the king. There is an engraving of a gentleman wearing
his sword to play tennis. Note that dueling was not made illegal until
1609, when a protracted peace was starting to take its toll on the nobility.

The idea of "clientage" is key to understanding the nobility of this
age. This overlaps the traditional feudal concept of vassalage, which is
less important now. A noble family cultivated a following of noble clients,
giving them appointments, benefices, pensions, etc. in return for loyalty
and service. (e.g. When you got someone a job in the tax department, you
expected them to do you little favors in return.) Clients of the great
would in turn have their own clientage, and so on. When the head of a great
house made a move (had a religious conversion, declared for or against
this or that policy or person or ruler), he took a whole pyramid of clients
with him and could shift the balance of power in France. The right and
ability to dispose of patronage is what kept the machinery of the great
houses running. The crown used the same technique to manage the great houses
themselves: paying them pensions to keep them quiet and giving them choice
royal appointments. Paying pensions to the nobility eventually consumed
about a third of the royal budget.

The traditional nobility is the noblesse d'epee (nobility of the sword),
but this century has seen the rise of a new nobility: the noblesse de la
robe (nobility of the gown). This the magisterial class that administers
royal justice and the civil government. In France, the Parlements (there
is one in Paris and several provincial ones) are more like judicial courts
than legislative bodies (as in England). Most of the men of the gown rose
from the wealthy merchant ranks. They studied law and made enough money
to buy a government office. During this century, the venality (selling)
of public office became a plague. The crown needed money, and one way of
raising it was to sell government jobs to the nouveau-riche. Most of these
jobs came with grants of nobility and excellent opportunities for graft.
It was considered a better deal to invest in a venal office (which you
could pass onto your heirs) than to risk your money in some kind of commercial
venture like the East India Company. Financial positions in the government
had traditionally been venal, but it was Francis I that made judicial positions
venal. There is a vast amount of resentment between the men of the sword
and the lawyers who are buying up their estates as the warrior class goes
bankrupt.

The third estate, those who worked, covered everyone from the rich merchant
who loaned money to the king to the poor share-cropping peasant who owned
little more than his shirt. These are the people who paid the bulk of the
taxes. Traditionally, it had been in the best interests of the seigneurs
to keep taxes low, as it impacted what they themselves were able to collect
from their own peasants. During this century, however, as the pattern of
landholding changed from tenant peasants who held lifetime rights to sharecroppers
with short-term contracts, the seigneurial solicitude for peasant welfare
decreased. 1594 saw a significant peasant uprising (the Croquants), as
the depredations of war, bad harvests, inflation, and seigneurial exactions
all came to a head. Note that during the war years the peasants often paid
their "taxes" several times over, but the royal treasury rarely saw any
of it.

Unlike in England, the Netherlands, or the Italian city-states, the
pursuit of wealth was not respected. Wealthy bourgeois remained members
of the third estate, and the wealthier they were, the more the crown suspiciously
eyed their money. During fiscal crisis, it wasn't unusual for the leading
citizens of Paris to be "encouraged" to make "loans" to the crown. During
this time of upheaval, as noble houses became extinct or fell into debt
to the merchant class, the bourgeois bought up noble estates. The French
have always had an almost mystical reverence for the land. The new owners
of a noble estate could become ennobled themselves if they and their descendants
lived on the estate for 40 years and provided the required military service.
Many of these new arrivals brought the bourgeois habits of careful business
management to these estates, making them more profitable than they had
been under their previous owners. Of course, they also favored the more
lucrative sharecropping arrangements for working the land, which made the
rural peasantry even poorer and more disenfranchised than they had been.

The peasants have suffered terribly in the later half of this century.
The early part of this century was quite prosperous and saw a big increase
in the population. However, this lead to land being subdivided into economically
unviable plots. Although inheritance laws varied by region, farmers divided
their land fairly equally among their sons in many parts of France. The
religious wars bred a generation of anarchic lawlessness, pillage, extortion,
and inflation that collapsed the rural economy. And on top of it all, the
weather has been bad. Many peasants have lost their rights of tenancy to
debt and have become marginal sharecroppers, while a few of the more prosperous
peasants have been buying up and consolidating their lands. That old fallback,
running away to the big city, has been less of an viable option as cities
try to struggle with their own poor and unemployed and take steps to discourage
new arrivals. The burden became too much to bear in the 1590s, which saw
widespread peasant revolts. The largest was the rising of the "Croquants"
in the Southwest in 1594. Henri IV was sympathetic to their suffering,
saying that if he were a peasant, he’d be a Croquant himself, but the revolt
was eventually suppressed in the usual way and the leaders executed.

Except in the Southwest, most of the peasants remained Catholic throughout
the wars. For one thing, there were about 100 religious feast days a year,
and they provided the only real relief from work most peasants got. This
is in contrast to the urban merchants, who viewed holy days as a loss of
opportunity to buy and sell and make money. Protestantism was much more
popular among the mercantile class. (One of the terms of the eventual Edict
of Nantes was that Protestants had to observe the Catholic feast days.)

In the cities, the artisans have also been affected by economic change.
Their guilds, traditionally the most powerful corporations in most towns,
have been losing ground to the emerging urban oligarchy of the wealthy
neo-capitalists. Urban poverty is also a big social problem. However, new
trades like printing have opened up new opportunities. Merchants and tradesmen
in the new industries are more likely to be literate, and for a while,
were more likely to be Protestant as well.

The major cities have been strongholds for the Catholic League, Paris
being the foremost. Because the League advocated deposing a legitimate
monarch, they ended up attracting political extremists that proclaimed
that all power came from the people. The first barricades went up in the
streets of Paris in 1588 (the beginning of a venerable French tradition).
During the anarchy between the end of Henri III's reign and Henri IV's
triumphal entry in 1594, Paris was ruled by "The Sixteen", a revolutionary
committee of citizens that enforced the rule of the people through a program
of terror. (The events of 1789 were never very far from the French soul.)

The chaos of civil war has meant that for the first time in centuries,
commoners may find themselves in careers as soldiers. Since the 14th century,
the nobility had considered it unwise to arm the common people. Most of
the infantry used in France were foreign mercenaries, hired from the Swiss
cantons or German princes. But the demand has been high enough to create
a market for the native-grown variety. One noble commander lamented this
trend, saying that a butcher's son might have an illustrious military career
and be honored by the great as if he were the son of a duke.